A little later Fuselli woke with a choked nightmare cry. He had dreamed that he had smashed the O.D. in the jaw and had broken out of the jug and was running, breathless, stumbling, falling, while the company on guard chased him down an avenue lined with little dried-up saplings, gaining on him, while with voices metallic as the clicking of rifle triggers officers shouted orders, so that he was certain to be caught, certain to be shot. He shook himself all over, shaking off the nightmare as a dog shakes off water, and went back to sleep again, snuggling into his blankets.

Based on the author's first-hand experience as an ambulance driver during World War I, this first novel is noteworthy for its vivid and colorful portrait of France at that time and for its passionate indictment of war. The author's disillusionment with war, for a time, turned him toward socialism and against capitalism. Finally, after being labeled "pro-German" and "pacifist," Dos Passos concluded that the quasi-religion of Marxism was far more brutal than "poor old Capitalism ever dreamed of." Reprinted from the unexpurgated original edition published by Cornell University Press in 1969.

Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) - Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics. In his prologue Dos Passos writes: "U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil...But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people". The trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. The volume contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passos' life and of world events cited in U.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection.

In this experimental trilogy, Dos Passos uses "camera eye" and "newsreel" sections to create a fragmented atmosphere. Through the testimony of numerous characters, both fictional and historical figures, he buids up a composite picture of American society in the first quarter of the 20th century.

One of the great figures of modern French literature. Swiss-born in 1887, but French to the core in spirit, Cendrars roamed the world for many years, a restless seeker who made life an adventure and his novels and poems the record of a never-satisfied appetite for human experience. As a young man he reached the Orient across Russia, and "The Transsiberian," one of his finest long poems is included in this volume. Over the years, a number of Cendrars' works were translated into English--early among them, in 1931, John Dos Passos' brilliant version of "Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles" (reprinted in this collection)--but all are now out of print here, so that this selection from the whole range of Cendrars is most timely. It has been prepared by Professor Walter Albert of Brandeis University, whose long introductory essay is the most detailed biographical and critical study of Cendrars now available in English. While the greater part of the selection is concentrated on Cendrars' poetry (with the French text printed en face), there are also representative excerpts from the major novels and other prose books, as well as several essays, including impressions of Chagall and Picasso.